As is known, in order to facilitate transport and storage of packs, the packs are generally grouped in an ordered fashion on usual load pallets.
In particular, each pallet supports a respective pile of packs, obtained by superposing a plurality of flat layers which are singly constituted by a group of coplanar packs placed adjacent to one another and loaded in advantageous directions.
To realise the pile of packs, palletising plants of known type predisposed each single layer on a service plane before moving the plane rigidly onto the pallet.
For this reason, these plants are generally provided with special mobile means for manipulating, such as for example plier devices, which grip and move one pack at a time in order to realise the desired layer on the service plane.
As is known, the packs can also be of different formats, for example according to the number of bottles or cans they are made up of, and the means for manipulation are generally able to adapt to the different dimensions of the packs.
From this fact, however, derives a drawback, i.e. that the productivity of the palletising plants depend to a considerable degree on the format of the packs being processed.
If a layer remains of the same overall dimensions, then if the packs are smaller, the means for manipulating will perform more operations and therefore each layer will take longer to be completed.
The aim of the present invention is to make available a machine which can group together discrete packs in order to obtain single groups having nonetheless about the same dimensions as larger-format packs.
In this way, the means for manipulating can treat each group of packs as if it were one only, thus effectively reducing the number of operations to be performed and therefore the overall time required, and in this way obviating the above-mentioned drawback in the prior art.
A further aim of the invention is to reach the above objective within the ambit of a simple, rational and economical solution.
These aims are attained by the invention as it is specified in the accompanying claims.